1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, generally, to the administration of user accounts, and, in preferred embodiments, to such systems and processes for provisioning users based on pre-defined policies, user roles, organizational information, attributes, and authorizations or information from a further user.
2. Description of Related Art
A common use of communication networks is to provide users access to network resources such as software, electronic data, or files in storage systems or databases connected to the network. As the number of users on a given network increases, there is often a need to control user access rights to resources on the network.
Network environments often involve a variety of network users, where the users may be grouped or categorized by a relation or role that the user serves in the environment. For example, in an engineering or technical development company environment, users of the company's computer network may include company officers, directors, managers, engineers, technical support staff, office support staff, accounting department staff, information technology (IT) department staff, contractors, consultants, temporary employees or other relation-based or role-based groups or categories of network users. Other companies, organizations or network environments may have other relation or role-based groups of users. Each user may have a need to access certain network resources in connection with the user's relation or role. In addition, it may be desirable to restrict users with certain relations or roles from access to certain resources, for example, for security, privacy or other reasons.
Depending on the network environment, other types of resources may also be allocated to (or restricted from) users, based on the user's relation or role in the environment. For example, in the engineering or development company environment described above, users may be allocated such resources as telephones, telephone accounts, computers, Internet accounts, e-mail accounts, office equipment and supplies, laboratory or engineering equipment and supplies, or other resources, based on the user's role or relation with the company.
In many conventional businesses or organizations, specific personnel perform the function of provisioning users according to their roles. For example, an office administrator may place an order with the organization's IT department to have a computer, telephone, voice mail, e-mail, and certain applications and databases available on the day a new user joins the organization. Individuals from the IT department would then manually set up these resources. Other office personnel may bring desks, chairs, and cabinets from storage and set up the user's office. Over the course of time, the user's relationship or roles within the organization may change, for example, as the user is transferred, promoted, demoted or terminated from the organization. As a user's relationship or role with the organization changes, the user's needs or rights to access resources may change.
The burden on the office administrator and office personnel to manually administer user access to resources in the above example is typically dependent on the size of the organization (the number of users) and the rate at which users join or leave the organization or otherwise change roles. To improve efficiency and reduce the burden on the office administrator and office personnel, some organizations have used software applications which automate or partially automate some of the tasks relating to provisioning certain, limited types of resources to users.
Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is one form of automatic provisioning that has become commercially available. RBAC provides permissions (access rights) to a user to access certain accounts (files, web pages, etc.) available over the network, based on a person's role in the organization. For example, a file or folder may be viewed only by its creator, or may be accessible to a larger group of users through an organization's network, depending on the permission rights established for that file or folder. In conventional RBAC systems, these permissions are based on a person's role within the organization.
However, modern organizations may be structured along several intersecting lines. For example, organizations may be structured according to title (presidents, vice-presidents, directors, managers, supervisors, etc.), technology (electronics, mechanical, software, etc.), project (product A, B, C, etc.), location (Irvine, N.Y., etc.) and the like. A single user may appear in several or all of these organizational structures, and thus may be in a somewhat unique overall role as compared to other users in the organization. Because this may require that many users be provisioned uniquely, many unique roles would have to be defined in the system to automate such provisioning. Furthermore, conventional RBAC only provisions “soft” resources such as accounts, applications, databases, files, Web pages, and the like, as opposed to “hard” resources such as telephones, computers, desks, and the like.